Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — When the Tea Party Patriots threw their support behind Matt Bevin, the underdog conservative challenger trying to unseat top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, President Jenny Beth Martin vowed the group would be “putting our money where our mouth is.”

So far, its “super-PAC” has mustered $56,000 worth of mailers in Kentucky on Bevin’s behalf — less than half the amount it has paid Martin in consulting fees since July.

The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, which blew through nearly $2 million in expenses such as fundraising, polling and consultants in the first three months of this year, is not alone.

A Washington Post analysis found that some of the top national tea party groups engaged in this year’s midterm elections have put a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they’ve endorsed.

The practice is not unusual in the world of big-money political groups, but it runs counter to the ethos of the tea party movement, which sprouted five years ago amid anger on the right over government spending. And it contrasts with the urgent appeals made by tea party groups to their base of small donors, many of whom repeatedly contribute after being promised their money will help elect conservative politicians.

Of the $37.5 million spent so far by the political-action committees of six major tea party organizations, less than $7 million has been devoted to directly helping candidates, according to the analysis, which was based on campaign-finance data provided by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group that seeks to shed light on political lobbying and fundraising.

The dearth of election spending has left many favored tea party candidates exposed before a series of pivotal GOP primaries next month in North Carolina, Nebraska, Idaho and Kentucky.

Three well-known groups — the Tea Party Patriots, the Tea Party Express and the Madison Project — have spent 5 percent or less of their money directly on election-related activity during this election cycle. Two others, the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks, have devoted about 40 percent of their money to direct candidate support such as ads and yard signs.

On average, super-PACs had spent 64 percent of their funds on directly helping candidates by roughly this stage in the 2012 election cycle, Federal Election Commission data show.